Hellavision

Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970) was an American author who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal-success literature.

I think it’s also fair to say that Napoleon Hill is a pioneer in the concept of rhyming advice.

I’ve often wondered why the self-help/motivational speaker gurus of the world favour rhymes as a device to transmit their message.  Perhaps it’s because the types of people who read self-help books are the same folks who favour the repetitive (and inane) pop melodies by acts like the Black Eyed Peas (who rhyme “let’s take it off” with “mazeltov”, managing to mock judaism and lower the collective intelligence of the human race in one fell swoop.  It would be like writing a song where I rhyme Jesus with Please Us in a lascivious way… don’t think I couldn’t either, but I won’t – because it would be wrong).

Before my current life as a small ‘b’ blogger I spent a significant amount of time doing high-octane direct sales.  I trained masses of (not-so) eager minions in the subtle ways of manipulation and hard selling.  I lived Glengarry, Glen Ross and Wall Street every day of my hollow life and I learned from “The Pope” the power of PMA (That’s Positive Mental Attitude, these guys favour alliteration as much as they do rhyming).

As it is with most sales people, the “wisdom” they pass on is essentially regurgitated rhetoric from one or a few of any number of sales gurus. My first was a fellow named Zig Ziglar.  Hilary Hinton “Zig” Ziglar is an American author and motivational speaker who coined the phrase, “It’s not your aptitude but your attitude that determines your altitude in life.”

Meaning aside, (I’d think it to be fairly obvious), it was that initial exposure to rhyming advice and my subsequent fall from sales grace that poisoned me to the whole idea.

That was a long time ago.  Another life.  One that came recklessly crashing back into my reality about two weeks ago when I read a quote from (obviously) a motivational speaker on a friend’s Facebook status.  I traced the quote back to Napoleon Hill (the fellow above) who, on his website has the following saying nestled among his 17 Scrolls of Success.

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.

People eat this up like shortbread at Christmas, apparently never getting to the questions that prevent me from succumbing to the intrinsic wisdom of the motivational prophets.  Questions like, “Yes, but what if in my mind I conceive that I have superpowers and can fly?  A lot of people die that way, and a lot of people that believe everything they conceive are locked up in asylums, but I guess you’re not speaking about them.  Or visible minorities, or people in third-world countries.”

Having said that, millions of people read the classic works of Napoleon Hill and I could count the number of readers I get on one hand.   Maybe I should try rhyming more?

Paul Watzlawick is an Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher.  I learned about Paul while reading a book by Erik Spiekermann called “Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn how Type Works” where I came across a single line from his 1967 book, Pragmatics of human communication.

The first of Watzlawick’s five axioms of communication (and the only one I can remember on demand, my memory really stinks) reads:

“One cannot not communicate” Because every behaviour is a kind of communication, people who are aware of each other are constantly communicating. Any perceivable behaviour, including the absence of action, has the potential to be interpreted by other people as having some meaning.

This book was published in 1967, so I imagine he had that thought long before then (and probably after).   I imagine today, were he still alive (he passed in 2007 – but internet years are like dog years so it’s fair to say that at least 20 years have passed since his departure from the mortal coil), he would be flabbergasted by the size of our personal networks and the rate at which they’re growing.  I know I am, and I’ve been here the whole time.